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by lritter303 4171 days ago
Actually, I very much wanted to do that, the problem is that there seems to be no Scheme implementation available that offers such a tight and convenient libffi integration. LuaJIT parses preprocessed C header files with very few adjustments. Terra, which links LuaJIT with LLVM, goes the full mile and directly uses libclang to generate interfaces.

If you know a Scheme implementation that does this (including supporting a LLVM back-end in addition to a regular, possibly JIT'ed interpreter), please do not hesitate to mention!
1 comments
Arcanum-XIII 4171 days ago
Gambit and Chicken are near your goal, but I don't know how far you can go with it. And there's of course GNU Guile.
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lritter303 4171 days ago
Neither is suitable. Guile has the wrong license, none of these three has bindings for a no-JIT code generator like LLVM.

It's no big deal though. The Scheme -> Lua compiler is small (300 lines) the dialect is better suited for hash tables and the dynamic part is mostly a driver to generate/execute machine code at runtime.

At this point, a switch to Scheme would service purism more than pragmatism. Lua is already a good Scheme VM (has been strongly inspired by Scheme, in fact) so it'll do. At least I hope it will. ;-)

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